African investors investing in Africa 🦁

Africa was the region home to the most investors active in Africa in 2023. At an individual country level though, the U.S. continues to dominate.

Back in January, we looked at how the number of investors active in Africa had evolved in 2023, and who were the most active of them. But we thought it could also be interesting to look at this investor community based on where they are headquartered:

In 2023, we identified at least 619 unique investors who have been involved in at least one $100k+ deal on the continent, 35% of which were HQ’ed in Africa. While it might seem intuitive, the fact that Africa was the continent where most investors in Africa were HQ’ed actually contrasts with the previous two years when the number one spot was held by North America (the U.S., really). But due to a dramatic drop in the number of North America-based investors in Africa between 2022 and 2023 (-47% YoY), Africa-based investors came on top in 2023. The other region that saw a progression of its representation was Europe (25%), still at #3 but closing in. The number of both Asia- and Middle East-based investors was more than halved during the same period with their representation down to 5.5% and 4.5% respectively. Story continues below…

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If we focus on the subset of investors who got involved in more than one deal (29% only) and are therefore probably less opportunistic and more strategic about their decision to invest on the continent, the proportion of those HQ’ed in Africa goes up to 39% while it goes down to 26% for North America, and is stable for Europe at 25%.

Zooming in on the HQ country more specifically, the U.S. comes seriously on top as 27% of active investors last year were based there (down from 31% in 2022), three times more than the runner up South Africa. Overall, the top 5 countries - who were host to almost 3 out of 5 investors active investors on the continent - have been pretty stable since 2021: the U.S., South Africa, Nigeria and the UK. The only exception is Egypt which made it to the top 5 in 2021 and 2022, but was replaced in 2023 by France, the only country in the top 10 to have seen an increase in the absolute number of investors involved in deals in Africa between 2022 and 2023. To finish, we should mention that China - which is often thought to have a lot of investors active in start-up deals in Africa - doesn’t even make it to the top 20, at least for disclosed investors…

This is technically the last post of our extensive series covering 2023 trends, which included many posts but also a LinkedIn Live presentation that’s already had a combined 20,000+ minutes of viewing (!) As always, we’d love to know the type of analysis you’re doing with our database. If you don’t have access to it yet, don’t forget to use this discount code. Allez, à bientôt! Max